


What You Don't Know Won't Hurt You - Much

by Trapelo_Road475



Category: Emergency!
Genre: First Time, Frottage, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-28
Updated: 2013-12-28
Packaged: 2018-01-06 10:31:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1105748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trapelo_Road475/pseuds/Trapelo_Road475
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One thing - maybe the only thing - most people can appreciate about Craig Brice is that if you've got a question, Craig Brice as a general rule has the answer.</p><p>What Jack Bellingham's found is that his partner doesn't seem to have an answer for himself, for what he feels, and no answers for what happens between them.</p><p>But it's alright, because Jack is patient, and because the other thing you can rely on is that if Craig Brice doesn't have an answer, he's going to do his damndest to find it.</p><p>Jack Bellingham and Craig Brice and their first time.  Jack's POV.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What You Don't Know Won't Hurt You - Much

**Author's Note:**

> Please note, when I first began writing this pairing, I had somehow missed the fact that Bellingham has a canonical first name. (the DVDs I had from the library skipped a lot, go figure). I wound up giving him a name that seemed reasonably suitable and it has stuck, at least, in my head. I like to hope that all four of you who are interested in this pairing will forgive me a foray into fanon.

One thing that's nice, that Jack Bellingham can really count on, is that if he doesn't know something - some piece of medical or departmental trivia - then Craig Brice probably knows it. At least, it would be nice if Craig didn't lord that big brain of his over people. Jack's been trying to grind away at that. He can be just as stubborn as Craig, in his own way. He likes to consider himself a patient man. He thinks that Craig is improving. Slowly. He thinks Craig would not consider it an improvement. But he thinks his partner's getting better, getting softer. 

Craig calls him by his first name, now. Catches himself at the station, but slips up when they're in the Squad together, or at Rampart when Craig's fixing the drug box for the six-hundredth time. Something about fixing that box kinda cools him off. Jack could be annoyed by it. Fixing the damn thing every run. And Craig calls him slow. But there's something sort of hypnotic about watching Craig work. Jack sort of likes the way Craig calms down when his hands are busy on some task or other. But Craig isn't being so abrupt with patients and he even calls Jack by his given name now and doesn't always bristle if Jack calls him Craig, so Jack thinks he's getting better. 

No one else seems to notice, though. Which might be alright with Craig. 

When he was first coming up in the department, a boot at 8s, they had a dog there that was missing an eye and half its tail, had a snaggletooth and drooled like a faucet. Everybody took one look at that dog and called it ugly. They might concede the dog - Bumper, they called him, 'cause he looked like he'd tangled with the front end of a Ford - was loyal to a fault and wagged that nub of a tail for all he was worth, but, face up to it, the dog was ugly. One time, Leo Beckett - sitting on their couch with Bumper - said really, the dog wasn't all that bad.

Captain Halford had looked up from the daily paper and eyed the both of them like lepers before he said, "Leo, you been lookin' at that mutt too long."

Just like Leo Beckett, Jack Bellingham's been looking at his snaggle-toothed mutt too long. 

Except - except there is that one day when Dixie catches him by the elbow.

That day, what a goddamn mess it was - the two of them being called out on an assist to the state hospital in Norwalk where a skinny boy with long hair and broken teeth and a mad, bad case of psychosis was holding an entire unit at bay with a knife. Gleaming thing, it was, and shamefully enough Jack had thought first of all the ways Craig could fuck the whole business up if he opened his mouth. A hospital cop was sitting on the stained ward floor pale with shock and an attendant in white and khaki lay very still in a puddle of his own blood, and a nurse was giving him CPR while the skinny boy kept up a banshee wail of terror and waved the knife at anyone who came near. 

Goddamn mess, that was. Someone maced the boy. The spray stung them both. Blood everywhere. The cop was alright but the attendant wasn't gonna leave any hospital on his own two feet, not ever.

Craig was still scrubbing his arms, later, at Rampart and Dixie had caught him by the elbow and Dixie, who did love her paramedics but was not the coddling type by any means, had said to him: 

"Jack, I don't know what you've been doing to Brice in your spare time, but if you don't mind, keep doing it. He's almost acting like a human being, lately."

He'd laughed. He'd sorely needed a laugh, that day. Craig's arms later were so red you might've thought he was sunburned.

That night was the first night he asked Craig to go for a beer. Craig had refused, of course. 

Every man on the job that Jack had ever known had his own peculiar ways of winding down. Of keeping the red and its teeth far at bay in the back of their minds. Some men cooked. Some men shot hoops out back. Jack had heard that Danny Coolidge at 45s would sing Christmas carols in the squad no matter the season. Some men drank. Some men were simply crazy. Jack was the type to go for a long drive in the hills, go do some grubby work in the yard, find somewhere far away to look at the stars. Jack wasn't sure what Craig did. He knew there must be something - it was, as Craig would have put it, simple logic. Everyone had something to keep the job from getting into his mind and tearing him apart. Something. Anything.

Jack thought sometimes of the way Craig's hands moved over the contents of the drug box. How he could re-organize it without even looking at the labels. How he had it memorized. Take it all out and put it back. Take it all out and put it back. 

Jack asked him many times, after, if he'd join him for a drink. Jack was cagey, and he didn't ask anything else of him - just a drink. 

He'd been looking at the mutt too long. He liked him, more than was reasonable. And he was getting better. He really, truly was. 

One time, Craig said yes. 

They ended up on the couch together, that one time, two beers apiece, and Craig rigid under his touch, Craig telling him nobody had ever touched him that way, nobody'd ever kissed him at all, except for that one time when he was a boy. It was funny, how when Craig told him that, his lower parts sat up and said that had to be a load of bull, and his upper parts retorted it made perfect sense, because who'd want to fuck Craig Brice?

It was funny, how it made sense both ways. Craig balked at his hands because, for the first time that Jack could recollect in knowing him, Craig didn't have a goddamn clue what to do or how to respond. The man could've named every nerve fiber and gland and hormone and brain cell involved in the process of desire, but didn't know the first thing about how to make out on a couch like any normal human being. Didn't seem even to know his _own_ body. 

After a while, Jack had been touching him, trying to coax his hands. "Craig?"

"Yes?"

"You want me to take you home?"

"Yes, please."

Craig's face was red and he looked so sweet, his eyes so wide and perplexed behind his glasses. Jack was really the gentleman. He took his partner home. Hadn't wanted to leave him at the door, and didn't really know why. 

"See you Tuesday," he'd said. 

Craig had nodded, sort of absently. "Tuesday. Yes."

Jack had gone home after that and after the television sign off had gone to bed and after twenty minutes of tossing he'd given up and jerked himself off, thinking about his partner, thinking about him not knowing anything, and how sweet a gift that could've been, thinking Craig would probably put in for a transfer and go right back to being the same jackhandle he'd been before the Chief had partnered them.

Tuesday, Craig was very quiet, unless they were on a run. He was so quiet, other people noticed it. Benson, their engineer, finally demanded outright to know what was going on. 

"Brice, for fuck's sake, I thought I'd be glad the day you kept your mouth shut for once, but what'd you do? Kill somebody?"

"You seen his bedside on some patients? They'd be lucky." That was Dan Pendleton, over the Darley Apparatus catalog. 

Jack reared himself up from the couch, a dull anger flinting across his gut. "Lay off him, both of you."

"Jack, you've been in the squad with Brice too long. People are gonna start thinking you actually like him."

"Lay off, I said."

Through this Craig said nothing. 

Even Jack had to admit it was an eerie thing. 

It was just about four Wednesday morning, coming back from a stupid call - some idiot yanking a box for nothing, false alarm - in the squad when Craig spoke finally. Hesitantly. 

"On Friday," he said. "After the shift is done, do you think that - I would like it if we - had another drink, Jack."

It was just about four, so Jack - slouched in the passenger seat, eyes half-closed - shrugged. "Fine with me."

Friday rolled around, and things were just about normal - as they ever were - and Craig reminded him about the drink and Jack felt a buzz of pleasure, as it was Craig's suggestion, and Craig had even used his given name, at the station no less, and as far as Jack knew Craig had not put in for a transfer and seemed as content - as he ever was - to be working alongside Jack. 

It becomes, after breakfast - because even Jack has some standards about alcohol before noon - very clear that Craig has been doing some research, and Jack doesn't know why he's even surprised, because it's Craig Brice, and you can nearly always rely on him to know something - and that on the rare occasions he doesn't know, he will find it out. Ruthlessly, as it happens.

It becomes painfully apparent that in spite of whatever research he's been doing, Craig Brice remains Craig Brice, and he has no idea how to connect anything he _knows_ to anything he _feels_.

(and, in spite of what the rest of the boys think, Jack knows that Craig must feel some things, somehow.)

Jack finds himself with his partner on his lap pushing him back onto the sofa, and his body is exceptionally pleased with it, excepting that five minutes later, Craig is flailing like he's drowning, and they're back to square one. 

"Hey, pal, slow it down some."

Craig sits up and puts his face in his hands. "I don't understand," he says. "Isn't this - what people do?"

"Craig - " he sighs. " - you told me you'd never even kissed another person. You're tryin' to - to - " Jack fumbles for some clear, concrete example. " - you run, right? I heard you did, in the fireman's olympics, right? Marathon, was it?"

"Yes."

"Well, you can't just get up and run thirty miles - "

"Twenty-six point two."

" - you can't just get up and run that many miles without, yannow, workin' up to it, isn't that right?" 

Craig peers at him, his mouth tight, then nods slowly. "Yes. It takes a lot of training and practice."

"Well, sex is kinda like that. First time I was ever with somebody, it was a hell of a lot different than I'd ever read in a textbook or seen in some health-class filmstrip. They don't tell you how different it is, when there's a person attached to all those organs."

Craig nods, as if he truly understands. "I read about it. I even got a magazine, at a store."

Jack can't help it. He starts laughing. It just bubbles up in him and Craig looks faintly hurt but he can't stop. "You bought a skin mag? Did you, really?"

"I wanted to know." His voice is taut and his face is red and Jack feels horrible for laughing. "I thought I should cover all the sources."

"Aw, Craig. I can't believe you really - boy. A skin mag."

"I thought it would help." He shifts, looking uncomfortable. Looking away. Looking at his hands like he wants to be doing something with them, maybe re-organizing their drug box or doing one of them puzzles that Benson buys every so often to prove he's smart and then gets frustrated with and abandons. "The models who were in the magazine didn't look like they were ... enjoying themselves. I think that Dan Pendleton would disagree. That is, he wouldn't believe I knew what enjoying something involved."

Jack snorts. "Sounds about right."

"Jack?"

"Mmhm."

"Thank you. For telling them to lay off. I am trying to - to understand, why I have difficulty working with others. I just want to do my job."

"I know. And what are friends for?"

"Are we friends?"

Jack grins. "Since I've had my tongue down your throat I would like to say yes, Craig."

Craig chuckles then. It is the smallest thing that sort of bursts out of his mouth like he doesn't know where it came from. He actually _smiles_. Jack feels like someone's punched him in the chest and he's half-hard in an instant. Jack reaches out and strokes his neck, tickles him under his ear where his hair feathers softly. 

"So, uh, this magazine, Craig. You - didja like anything you saw?"

"I told you. They looked - bored. It didn't look like fun. Do people do that? For fun?"

"Absolutely."

"Do you?"

"Not lately."

"Why?"

Jack shrugs. A part of him doesn't feel like talking but it seems to be helping Craig. So he's alright with that. And he is a patient man. "Haven't had anybody lately I feel like doing it with."

Craig's back is still straight as a church pew, and his hands are on his knees. It's strange to see him wearing jeans. He looks very ordinary, in a checkered shirt with a collar. Like you could drop him into any bar in the city and put a beer in front of him and he'd be indistinguishable from any other man in the crowd. He's handsome, past the stiff posture and the tremble of frustration on his face, someone you wouldn't believe hasn't ever gotten to first base with anyone, nevermind all the way home. 

"The first time - " Jack begins, and reaches over to touch Craig's shoulder, because touch gets his attention, good or bad, and Jack might like to bring Craig back to the sensible world for a moment, " - the first time I ever got any, that is, with a girl, we were doin' it - making out - in my dad's car, and it was one of them big Chevy station wagons, like it was a boat on wheels, all beat up from havin' six kids goin' on all kinds of trips in it. Anyhow, we were makin' out and you'd think - I'd got my hands up her shirt and we were really goin' on it, and one of us bumped the parking brake, and the damn car - it just started rolling. I didn't notice for a minute and then my girl started screaming, and I kinda freaked out and I couldn't find the brake for a second and almost hit the gas and flooded the damn engine, and by the time I got the car all under control again my girl - Barbra, that was her name, Barb Peters - was cryin' and laughin' and my pecker was about as limp as a wet noodle, but I was laughing too."

"You could've been in an accident. Why were you laughing?"

"Just the adrenaline of it, I guess. Just how we - or I was - all het up to go, and thought it'd be like in the movies, but it wasn't, and we just went to this hamburger stand, Ben's Dairy Joy, and we had a milkshake and I took her home. It was just funny. Things don't always go so perfect as you'd want 'em, or even anywhere near it."

"Are you trying to make me feel better?" Craig is peering at him like he's far away. 

"I guess so."

"I didn't like the magazine," Craig offers, slowly, carefully, like the words are a marble he's trying not to crush his teeth against, "but I liked - the idea of it, when I thought about - " God, Jack thinks, he's fucking blushing, " - when I thought about you. I had a dream. It was very nice."

Oh. Oh, someone save him, someone light the fucking building on fire, he thinks. Craig's soft and wary voice sends a bolt right to his groin that almost doubles him up. His mouth is dry but he manages - slipping an arm across Craig's back, real smooth, yeah, real slick move that is - to clear his throat, and ask, "Say, uh, why don't you - tell me about your dream, okay?"

"It's only a dream."

"I hope it was a good one."

"It was pleasurable, yes."

"So tell me about it."

"It seems very foolish to talk about a dream. It didn't happen."

Jack dances his fingers over Craig's bicep. "I could make it happen, if you tell me."

Craig makes this weird sound that Jack has never heard before, and he's worried, for a moment, he's actually snapped - that Craig's actually crazy, with a sound like that. He is crazy, of course, no denying that, but real crazy, locked crazy, Norwalk back-ward crazy. But no. His lips are just parted and he's panting a little. He takes a deep breath and speaks very quickly. 

"In the dream you and I were in my bed and you took my clothes off, no, you just opened my shirt and my pants, I was lying on my back and you touched me a lot, it's hard to remember."

"Wet dream?"

Craig nods briskly. 

Jack grins. "Nice to know you got the same working parts as anybody else."

"It is a normal physical reaction, yes."

"How 'bout I open your shirt now?" Jack reaches with his other hand - they are close, so close, the way they might be at a scene, crouched over a patient. That peculiar intimacy that no one else but the other paramedics quite understand. Like stained with the same man or woman's blood you share some kind of secret. Like being anointed. Jack reaches and undoes one button and Craig makes a soft sound again. "Is it alright?" 

"Do it." Craig hiccups. "Please."

One, two, three, almost all the way to Craig's belt. Jack tries to be conversational. It's not ordinarily his nature, when he's riled up, when his aim is a roll in the hay, to pause for a chat, but it's his partner, for Christ's sake, and more than that, he thinks if he doesn't keep talking Craig's going to freeze up again, gonna panic and maybe bolt for good this time.

Jack doesn't want that. Not just 'cause he's got a hard-on to beat the band, either. He can't stand the thought of it - his perfect, precise, put-together partner flipping out on him. Jack's the patient kind, always has been. Always been kind with his hands. The last one to hurt another fellow. Always the peacemaker.

"You know, it's funny, but I think I've seen less of you than all the rest of the shift put together. Even Cap. You know Cap's got an army tattoo on the top of his hip? I saw it in the showers once, after a brushfire detail. And Benson - well, Benson's got enough hair he could clog a drain just by walking past it, and that was not exactly something I _wanted_ to know, but you - I never really seen _you._ "

Craig is breathing so fast now his words stutter like an old locomotive banging over heat-warped tracks. "I don't think it's appropriate to parade around like that. If we got a call. If - " he pauses, and then looks at Jack with a startling clarity, " - I don't like it. Being seen."

"Hey, it's true, not everybody likes flaggin' in the breeze, but I barely even seen you without a shirt on, is all ... " Jack grins then, at a pleasing thought, touching Craig's chest through his undershirt, " - so this is a new experience."

Craig is just beginning to relax now. His expression is a little softer. His neck seems tighter, and he twinges under Jack's hands, as if every time he notices his muscles unwinding, he jolts then taut again, like an animal in retreat. Jack is gunning on instinct and he pushes Craig back against the sofa and nuzzles against him.

"You like this? Is it like your dream?"

He feels Craig nod. He presses his face, his lips, into Craig's chest. He leaves dampness on his undershirt. He kisses the vulnerable skin at the base of his neck, at the juncture of his collarbones, above the sharp v-neck collar. Jack sneaks his hands then into Craig's shirt and pulls it from his jeans, along with the undershirt. 

"You lemme if you need me to stop, Craig." Conversational. Cool and collected. Sweat's pooling down his own spine, watching his partner fall apart.

Craig grunts. Actually and legitimately _grunts_. Jack would laugh, almost does, except he pushes himself up to look, to see, the heaving of his chest and the way his throat works and the way his head is tilted back and it's the most open, uninhibited, mussed-up and dismantled he's ever seen Craig look, ever. It grabs him right by the guts, it does, makes him dizzy. He thinks last time he felt like this he was a teenager, the workings of his body brand-new and glossy to him, like a magazine, like a far-distant horizon in the sun.

Jack kisses his partner on the mouth. Craig kisses back. Jack murmurs: "Tell me about the dream again."

Craig's voice is dark and hazy, honey on the comb, writhing with bees. His glasses are smudged and his eyes are closed and when he speaks he breathes his words into Jack's mouth.

"When I was sixteen, and four months, I met a girl that four boys said was beautiful, and seven said she was a 'hottie', that was the word they used. My school was very small, no more than one-hundred-and-fifty or so students in six grades, and this was statistically significant at the time. Reuben Palmer, who ran cross-country with me, asked me what I thought of her, and I said that she was considered attractive by school standards and that she had an unusual prowess with the oboe, so I was told."

Jack nods, kissing Craig's jaw, touching him deliberately as he listens - stroking up his arm, palming his stomach, tapping fingers across his chest. He lays his hand wide against Craig's thigh once and Craig bucks against him, his voice hinging, almost breaking. 

"There was a former mill pond on the school grounds, and over the outlet there was a covered bridge where students went to engage in illicit activities such as smoking, and drinking, and sexual acts. I met this girl there, her name was Katherine Monroe. Reuben told me to."

Jack pauses. "Thought you said there was only one time you'd kissed someone."

"You are correct. And that is true - " Craig's breath hitches again with a soft touch. " - she did not kiss me." Even for Craig, his voice is unnaturally steady. Hoarse and dry, but steady, as if it he's focusing all his will on keeping himself together. "She told me Reuben and several of the other boys thought I was a homosexual - a 'faggot', she said - and she thought that I was - not deserving of the term, and she would help me prove that I was not. Katherine offered to engage in oral sex, which I did not think was appropriate - "

Jack tries, for a difficult moment, to re-arrange his brain around a sixteen year old boy turning down a blowjob. He doesn't think, had some pretty girl offered to polish him off at that age, he'd have been able to manage even getting his pants undone. But he probably would've wanted it. He wanted a lot of things at sixteen. Jack doesn't know what Craig wanted, then. Or what he wants by telling him this. It's something important, something cryptic like a star just after sunset. Jack wants to know. He thinks that he needs to know, he needs to understand. Patients - he thinks, patients tell stories, sometimes, deliberately rambling stories in terror or pain. They are trying to hide. They are trying to build walls of words and memories. 

"So what'd you do?" He stops touching, and Craig shifts slightly. They're tangled up together now, on Jack's couch. 

"Katherine said that she only felt sorry for me, and if I really were a queer, she said, she did not mind, and if I wanted, she would tell Reuben and the rest of the boys that we'd done what we hadn't."

"So you let her tell 'em?"

"It was wrong, and it was self-serving."

"Benson's wrong. You _do_ have a soft side," Jack teases him.

"Benson thinks that you are mentally imbalanced, because you haven't asked for a new partner."

"I like the partner I have just fine."

"Jack, what I am trying to tell you is that this is all very much out of the realm of my experience."

Jack leans over and kisses his temple. The metal arm of his glasses is warm. "And what I am tryin' to ascertain here, partner, is whether or not you want it to be - " Jack drops his hand between Craig's legs, and the other man jerks so hard he practically tosses them _both_ off of the couch, " - _within_ your experience."

Craig nods. His glasses are askew. "Yes, please." 

Benson would shit himself if he could even so much as imagine The Animal rutting the Perfect Paramedic against his couch; but then again, Benson would eat his own hat, badge and all, if he knew that Jack Bellingham liked men as much as ladies. It's a funny thought, it is, and Jack might tell Craig about it later. But Craig's eyes are wide and glassy, and his hand is fisted up in the collar of Jack's shirt, and when Jack strokes up the inside of his thigh and palms his crotch again he feels his erection and Craig moans against his shoulder.

Jack looks at him close up - hair damp with sweat, cheeks flushed, his lips parted and his teeth bared - and thinks god almighty, I bet he's a screamer.

"Tell me," Jack says again, "tell me about the dream again, Craig." He rakes his hand down - chest to belly to groin - and back up, beneath his shirt, hot skin and hair, and he thinks please god let this be okay, don't let him think he's crazy, don't him think he's gotta sew himself back up even tighter after this, let me see his eyes like this again sometime, let me see him smile. 

"I told you," Craig whimpers, "what else. I told you everything."

"Did I touch you?"

"Yes."

"Did you like it?"

" _Yes._ "

"Is it like this, what I'm doin' now?"

"Yes, please, _yes_ \- " Craig gasps shortly, " - dammit - "

Jack can't help rubbing himself against his partner, Craig's grip on his shirt tightening until he feels the hem tugging out of his jeans, Craig sort of helpless against him, like a box of parts shaken up and dumped all out, some mad clattering puzzle on the pavement.

Craig arches very suddenly and shivers, and then his voice is higher, plaintive, startling Jack - 

" - stop, wait, stop - stop - "

Jack stops. "You okay, buddy?"

Craig looks like he's just run ten miles, panting and red-faced and wet-lipped. " - I - I'm sorry, I - you - "

Torn apart and shaken to pieces. 

It dawns on Jack after a moment, what Craig is struggling to get out. "Oh - you - oh, you came, huh?"

Red faced and redder. 

Jack grins. Touches Craig's cheek. 

"I was - to understand - " Craig gulps his breaths, " - that was not - a desirable outcome."

He snorts. "That was the whole _point_." Jack could let himself be driven crazy, if he wanted. He thinks that he already is crazy, his heart pounding like a jackrabbit, still stumbling over the fact that his partner, who everyone agrees is all brain and no heart and no hands, is shivering under him in whatever qualifies as a post-orgasmic lull. It's a biological response, it's true, normal and natural and sometimes inevitable as the seasons, and he's still wrapping his mind around it. Around Craig. Who licks his lips and murmurs, almost sheepishly:

"It was very quick."

"Happens to the best of us. Hell, happens to almost everyone."

Craig reaches for him, fingers just skimming the bare skin of his arm. "I - am under the impression reciprocation is - expected?"

Looking at him, Jack has the most brilliant idea he's had in the past - oh, however long it's been since his dick started thinkin' Craig was one of the finer things he'd seen in his time in the department. "Watch me," he rumbles, heavy, quiet.

Craig stares at him, and Jack shifts, sprawling back against the sofa. Still close to Craig, who seems fascinated and far-away all at once. Jack unbuttons his jeans and takes his pecker in hand. "C'mere," he says, pulling Craig by the shirt, kissing him - wide-open and wet, with Craig responding tentatively in kind. "Watch me." He strokes himself and his partner watches, and Jack watches him for a while, too, the dry blush across his cheeks and nose, the smudges on his glasses, the faint hickey Jack's left near the collar of his tee-shirt. Craig looks so ordinary it hurts, and so beautiful it's like an animal in his chest. Jack groans softly, touching himself, thinking about how in the hell he's going to manage the next shift with his partner beside him in the squad. His eyes slip shut. 

And then he starts, when another hand touches his wrist, and if he looks down he _will_ come right there, so he looks at Craig's throat instead, which has a touch of light stubble on it. Jack felt it bristle his lips before. Kissing a man's like that. An ordinary man. Like his partner, his Craig, so brilliant and so innocent and so stupid sometimes he must be crazy, and Jack must be crazy, too, sitting here with him. Craig's hand follows his. Craig doesn't touch him, but Craig follows him and his lips are moving like prayer or pleading.

Pleasure rolls down his spine like it's taking a stroll in the sun, in sweet waves. Craig leans closer on him, leans closer, and it's like the heat is spilling off him, spilling into Jack's body. The closer he gets the harder Jack breathes and the firmer he strokes, until Craig kisses his jaw and his neck and the corner of his mouth, and Jack can't hold himself back anymore, and comes so hard he almost bites Craig's lip.

They are both quiet now. Even sticky as he is - as they both are - and starting to slump, Jack almost has the presence of mind to worry, when Craig doesn't say anything for long minutes. 

"You wanna clean up?" Jack asks. "Bathroom, shower's all yours, I, uh - lemme catch my breath, though, before I got to take you home." He figures that's what Craig wants now - to wash off and go home and get in his clean blue pajamas (Jack doesn't know what Craig wears to bed when he's not at the station, but clean blue pajamas buttoned to the neck sounds about right, the kind Jack could unbutton sometime) and fold his glasses on the bedside table and go to sleep. 

"Did you enjoy that, Jack?"

" 'Course. Did you...?"

Craig's voice is soft and husky. "I enjoyed it very much."

"Yannow ... " Jack pauses, and hums softly, " - you could stay, if you wanted. Took everything to the laundromat just the other day, put clean sheets on last time I was home." 

"You thought that I would stay?"

"I hoped you might."

"Neither of us is scheduled tomorrow."

"Nope. Look, buddy, I'll take you home if you want, no obligation."

Craig fixes him with a hard look, a fierce look, as if he is taking a choice in his hands and wringing its neck. "What if I _want_ to stay." And then his face gets still again. His words seem to startle him, in a tumble from his mouth.

"Then I won't say no." 

"Jack, I would like to stay."

Jack grins at him. "Alright then. But I warn you, I don't think I got anything extra that'll fit you."

Jack swears that there is a laugh just hanging on the corner of Craig's eye. 

As it is, he settles for the soft smile, and for the way Craig leans in and their foreheads touch and his eyes are closed and he seems, for one rare and settled moment, calm.


End file.
